The Fear of Old Age

“Forever Young” has always had a special resonance for me – not simply because of my surname but rather because of what has been  my disinclination to think of how ageing might affects me.

A couple of posts last August, eg Intimations of Mortality and Facing up to our Mortality were perhaps the first indication of how my attitude was beginning to change – identifying and excerpting from three important books -

- Being Mortal – illness, medicine and what matters in the end; by a very literate and humane American surgeon, Atul Gawande (2014);

- Ammonites and Leaping Fish – a Life in Time; by British writer Penelope Lively (2003) – a short but delightfully-written musing on what it is to be “old”. This article is a selection of the first half of the book from which I have extracted this - 

I think there is a sea-change, in old age – a metamorphosis of the sensibilities. With those old consuming vigours now muted, something else comes into its own – an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that you are still in. Spring was never so vibrant; autumn never so richly gold. People are of abiding interest – observed in the street, overheard on a bus.

The small pleasures have bloomed into points of relish in the day – food, opening the newspaper (new minted, just for me), a shower, the comfort of bed. It is almost like some kind of end-game salute to the intensity of childhood experience, when the world was new. It is an old accustomed world now, but invested with fresh significance; I've seen all this before, done all this, but am somehow able to find new and sharpened pleasure.

- Out of Time – the Pleasures and Perils of Ageing by British feminist and sociologist Lynne Segal (2013) I found rather too self-indulgent but the late-lamented Jenni Diski reviewed it superbly in the link the title gives , with this part focusing on the politics - 

One of her primary concerns is the war between the generations. The one in which, to our surprise, we are now the old and tiresome. But this time, there are worse accusations being chucked around. We are the baby boomers, the demographic catastrophe waiting to happen that is now happening. Baby boomers lived their youth in a golden time.
Far from having to go into tens of thousands of pounds of debt, we had free tuition and decent grants to live on while we received a higher education. The generation that bore us and lived through the hardships of war and austerity, while disapproving of us, also provided us with welfare benefits that allowed us to take time off from earning a living, to play with ideas and new ways (we thought) of organising socially and politically, of exploring other cultures, drugs, craziness, clothes and music.

Now, this free time seems mythic. If we wanted jobs, there were plenty of them. If we didn’t, we benefited in a way that would be called scrounging now (it was then, but no one stopped it).
 We are costing a fortune as we age and we’ll go on to cost much more because medical science has promised us twenty more years of some sort of life than our parents expected.Our pensions, the medical expertise and equipment, the time and energy needed to care and cater for a disproportionately large aged population: all this, the young have been told, is coming out of their earnings and limiting their wellbeing. We got grants to do up houses we bought cheaply. They can’t get a mortgage. Workers to our queens, they are providing our good life, in suburbia, beside the sea, in sunny Spain, filling hospital beds, out of their taxes.

We take our pensions, our cold weather payments, foreign holidays and cruises, while the young struggle to find jobs to pay for our needs, our strokes, our previously unhealthy lifestyles that caused the sicknesses which the impoverished NHS is obliged to cure.
Segal, quite rightly, doesn’t blame the young for their anger, but mostly the media for provoking it. ‘Older people lived the “good life”. Why should the young have to pay for it?’ the Guardian asks. ‘Crumblies should stop whingeing and claiming priority over a scant welfare budget. We created this me-first world, now we should give something back,’ says 74-year-old Stewart Dakers. 

Some articles I archived in 2012 and 2013 show that the physical side of ageing was beginning even then to register on me – particularly “Daddy Issues”; a review of the “Amour” film; a shocking commentary about Japanese attitudes; and a piece on the loneliness epidemic  

I notice that I now have a dozen or so books on the theme of ageing and death including a solitary humorous take on the subject - Growing Old – the last Campaign - by Des Wilson (2014). The link is actually to a powerful defence of the elderly from the resentful anger which Diski refers to – written by Wilson who was the most famous British campaigner of the second half of the century

The British philosopher John Gray reviewed last year a couple of important books on the subject -

The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life; by retired British gerontologist, poet and polymath Raymond Tallis (2015) - and

The Worm at the Core: on the Role of Death in Life; by American psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski 

Both books cite the work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker The Fear of Death (1973) (whose work is now undergoing something of a revival) who suggested that flight from death is the driving force of civilisation. Many of humanity’s greatest achievements, as well as its worst crimes, can be understood as attempts to ward off mortality.

Tallis’ book is a complex philosophical read as indicated by this Spiked Online review

Tallis is a convinced atheist – not the all-too-familiar kind, typified by Dawkins, which rants on incessantly about the evils of religion, but the rarer, more intelligent variety that finds the very idea of God empty and incoherent.

The Black Mirror, he tells us, “is, ultimately, a work of praise and gratitude”. It is true that the book contains many invocations of beauty and joy: “ploughlands bordered with bare hawthorn hedges scribbled on low dark and grey skies rifted with brilliance”; the simple pleasure in existing on a dull Wednesday afternoon. Overall, though, the mood is melancholy, heavy with regret for how much of the life that is gone was left unlived. Pursuing “some dream of changing the world (and of course his prospects in it) for the better”, the author “allowed himself to be indifferent to an April evening, glistening with dew and birdsong, that could have become itself in his consciousness”. Now it is getting late:

The German television channel Deutsche Welle actually contains the best take on the second book’s theme in an interview which allows the authors to explain their theory about how we handle our existential fear of death which they call, curiously “terror-management” 

For most of human history, most people didn’t have all that much. Life was short; you spent most of your waking hours trying to find something to eat. And in the absence of the technology for mass production, most folks did not accumulate all that much. The primary mode of production was that we had to make stuff by hand. If you were a shoemaker, you made an entire shoe - and if you made good shoes then you could feel justly proud for your accomplishments. 

And then the industrial revolution comes along. And on the one hand, mass production gives us the capacity to produce high quality goods at prices that many people can afford. On the other hand, the division of labor just radically shifted the nature of work. Now, you don’t make a whole shoe any more, you just slap the heel on it. And that’s what you do for eight hours a day for forty years. You don’t own a shoe; you take no pride in slapping the heel on it. And consequently, there is no longer the capacity for acquiring self-regard by virtue of what you literally do. From humans as makers to humans as takers - a radical shift from valuing yourself by your accomplishments in terms of what you tangibly produce to valuing yourself by abstract figures in a bankbook..... 

And one thing that we can do is buy a lot of rubbish. Another thing we can do is to take the death anxiety and to pin it on other people either in or outside of our culture - and to just say “oh, these are the all- encompassing repositories of evil”. It used to be the communists. And now, it’s Islamic terrorists. Domestically, we used to hate the hippies – but they are okay now, because jeans cost 200 bugs and the hippies are hedge fund managers. So then, we hate homosexuals, right? But they are ok, so now, we hate old people or we hate people who don’t speak English and so on... So, what will we do with those folks? Well, belittle them or we try to convince them that our way of life is better or - when that doesn’t work - we just kill them.

And I actually unearthed (and downloaded) today The Loneliness of The Dying a short book written by the famous Anglo-German sociologist Elias Norbert in 1985 –

John Gray perhaps puts it best –

Religions have their afterlives, while secular faiths offer continuity with some larger entity – nations, political projects, the human species, a process of cosmic evolution – to stave off the painful certainty of oblivion. In their own lives, human beings struggle to create an image of themselves that they can project into the world. Careers and families prolong the sense of self beyond the grave. Acts of exceptional heroism and death-defying extreme sports serve a similar impulse. By leaving a mark, we can feel we are not just fleeting individuals who will soon be dead and then forgotten.

Against this background, it might seem that the whole of human culture is an exercise in death denial. This is the message of Stephen Cave’s thoughtful and beautifully clear Immortality: the Quest to Live For Ever and How It Drives Civilisation (2012). A more vividly personal but no less compelling study of our denial of death is presented in Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematorium (2015), in which the author uses her experience of working at a Californian funeral parlour to show how contemporary mortuary practice – removing the corpse as quickly as possible, then prettifying it so that it almost seems alive – serves to expel the fact of death from our lives.

update; 
In October, this fascinating review about longevity
And, in December , https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/15/old-people-dementia-death-social-care-costs; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fixed_Period 
On December 31, Joseph Epstein penned this magnificent ode to approaching 80
In January this first part of a series

Celebrating what has gone before

Every now and then I contemplate christening the elegant old house which has been home for me these past 7-8 summers – walkers occasionally give it an admiring glance but I discovered yesterday that it has acquired not only a new status (in a superbly produced little guide about traditional houses and skills in the area – entitled Carpathian Gate) but also a name "Burlacu Lucia".

A couple of charming young women arrived yesterday and presented me with a plaque about the house for installing on the fence at the road " (although I will have to question the idea that the house is late 19^th century) - also a couple of copies of their little booklet in Romanian. 

They belong to a small foundation (The Centre for Mountain Ecology) which is doing the sort of work Daniela and I were bemoaning was all too little evident in the country....this is another example of their work from their site http://cem.ro/galerie/case-fundata/. 

One of the women was actually German, married to the Romanian who heads up the NGO

As you can imagine, I'm delighted that there are some people around here celebrating traditional architecture and skills.......For someone who earned his money these past 25 years from preaching the “modernist” agenda, I have developed quite a respect (if not passion) for the “old ways”… A few years back I did a couple of posts about this subject - http://nomadron.blogspot.ro/2012/06/village-tradition-and-solidarity.html and http://nomadron.blogspot.ro/2012/06/getting-under-skin.html and a little section of my library here is about village life this past century in various parts of Europe eg

- Geert Maak's Island in Time (2000)

- "Thin Paths - journeys in and around an italian mountain village" (2012) beautifully written with black and white photos giving it a WG Sebald feel...
The full list of such books can be found on a post I did last year about some of the relics found in our house when we bought it in 2000 and the extent of the work Daniela did to bring it back to life  

At my age it becomes particularly important to celebrate memories and traditional skills..I therefore liked the booklet on "craftsmen" on the NGO website - which reminded me of a lovely little booklet/notebook I have from 2010 ("Calet de notiste despre mesteri si mestesuguri" (ARHITERRA) which lists about 100 craftsmen throughout Romania - unfortunately it doesn't give a website although it does contain a reference to this French site .

Sirnea is a bit "off the beaten track" compared with the other nearby villages you will find in a lovely little glossy produced recently about a local poet and scupltor - "Legenda Branului". Indeed the village is almost in a bit of a "time warp" - which gives it an additional charm for me....that's the wrong word - but the life these people lived needs more recognition eg my old neighbour Viciu (age 89) down the hill was the postman in the 1960s and 1970s and delivered the mail on horseback - from Bran!!! He lost his wife last year and has this year been living with his daughter in Bran. It would be great if people could talk with him about these days and record it in a proper book about village life in the middle of the 20^th century……..
Some of you may be interested in these flickr photos I uploaded today of the area as experienced last month by 3 relatives who spent a couple of weeks based here

Academics who produce the goods

In the 2 posts I did after the 23 June Brexit result, I tried to give a sense of how subsequent events were covered by some of the UK, European and American “writers” I respect (whether in The Guardian, LRB, Eurozine, der Spiegel or New York Review of Books).

A strong theme which emerged in their comments was the extent to which balanced analysis has been replaced (in both the tabloids and social media) by shrill partisanship and the careless treatment of “facts”……. Everything these days is “relative” – there is always a different perspective – the world is too confusing - so it’s not worth listening to “the experts”……

Exactly how this translated into electoral behaviour is powerfully shown at page 15 of a fascinating presentation made at the LSE by a Professor only a week after the result - After the EU Referendum – what next for Britain and the EU?

Bear in mind that some 90% of the public advice given (by economists and global think-tanks) on the economic aspects warned of the very tangible damaging effect which Brexit would have on British investment, shares and employment. “Project Fear” was a term which had been skilfully used by the Scottish nationalists during the 2013-14 Scottish referendum to try to belittle the arguments of those who argued for Scotland to remain in the UK. And this was the term which was duly trundled into use this year to make light of the dangers of withdrawing from the EU.

The difference, however, is that a huge 42% of those polled in the last few weeks of the 2014 Scottish referendum campaign considered that they would be “worse off” in an independent Scotland (3 other options were given - "better off", "no difference" and "don't know"). 
In June of this year – despite several official estimates which put a very tangible figure of several thousand pounds as the annual cost per earner of Brexit – exactly half that number (21%) gave that judgement about British withdrawal from Europe. 
By contrast almost half (45%) of those polled in early June this year for the UK referendum considered it would make “no difference” to them economically (compared with only 22% of the Scots 2 years ago)

In other words, “Project Fear” worked in 2014 but totally failed in 2016

Are the Scots more gullible (we did after all vote strongly for remain)? Can the same trick not work twice? More probable is Hix's more nuanced argument about the new social divide between the "precariat" and professionals - life is so bad for so many people that threats of it getting worse have lost meaning......they just want to kick out......  

Simon Hix’s presentation can be viewed on Youtube – and I really would recommend that you follow both the video and the power-point presentations since he gives the best analysis I have yet seen of the reasons for people voting the way they did - as well as an excellent assessment of what happens now. 

It clearly helped that he was part of a multi-disciplinary team of academics who travelled around the country talking to ordinary people about the issue...it's clear that he learned a lot from the exercise. And (despite his own views - he is after all a Professor of European politics) he is emphatic that "Brexit means Brexit" 

Academics get a bad name for talking down to us in abstruse language but the same research website The UK in a changing Europe has several excellent articles eg this one written in the aftermath of the vote by the indefatigable Richard Rose

And one more positive example of what academics are capable of if they turn their minds sufficiently to the real world is this 13 page memo published today by 2 British academics “Getting out Quick and Playing the Long Game 

A ‘three step’ Brexit solution, including an ambitious transitional arrangement, is key to meeting the aspirations of the British people and reaching a mutually beneficial long-term relationship with the EU. This would see the UK leave the EU towards the end of 2018 and enter a transitional arrangement, possibly lasting until 2024, which would offer the time and space needed to more coolly and calmly negotiate a long-term agreement. The outcome of the EU referendum laid down the general parameters required for such a transitional agreement:

1. Parliamentary sovereignty should be restored. All EU law would be transposed into British law and a ‘Petitions Committee’, comprising a variety of representatives, should be empowered to hold hearings on whether an EU law should be repealed or amended on the basis of a petition from a certain threshold of British citizens or companies. The UK should no longer be subject to the formal force of the EU Court of Justice’s judgments.

 2. Crucially, this committee should involve not only the ‘usual suspects’ from stakeholder society – though devolved administrations, local government and key interests should be involved. It should also reach out to groups that are not usually involved in exercises such as this but who turned out in force to vote in the referendum.

 3. A joint UK-EU commission could assess whether countermeasures were appropriate if judgments or interpretations by British regulatory bodies departed from EU law. These countermeasures could have consequences for UK exporters’ access to EU markets.

 4. Free movement of EU citizens cannot carry on in its current form. A compromise would be only to grant residence to those who have an offer of a full time job and a new income threshold for those seeking to bring their families to the UK, as is the case for UK nationals seeking to bring in a non-EU spouse.

 5. The UK should no longer formally contribute to the EU budget. The UK’s net contributions could be replaced by direct UK bilateral support to the poorer EU member states.

 6. Scotland and possibly Northern Ireland will need a closer relationship with the EU than other parts of the UK. This could involve keeping EU law in place in Scotland, including free movement of person, in return for participation in the work of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) in Brussels.

 The hurdles to such a transitional agreement should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, it could appeal to EU partners since it secures a quick Brexit and allows a high degree of economic predictability while negotiating a longer-term deal. Within the UK, such an arrangement would allow the broadest possible participation in the process of untangling the UK from EU law and responsiveness to unpopular EU laws, whilst securing an orderly exit.

The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters

Global events have struck me dumb…Brexit did not so much surprise as shock me – into a deep depression. But it’s not so much the result per se as the new tone of global politics of which this is simply one expression – any pretence at reason has been surrendered to the exercise of brute power and stirring of visceral hatreds as evident in Trump’s victory and events in Turkey, Nice and Munich…..let alone Baghdad and Kabul

They’ve apparently been talking in the US for some 5-6 years about “post-truth politics” but it was an important recent article argues that technology is at the root of the new drift 

It was hardly the first time that politicians had failed to deliver what they promised, but it might have been the first time they admitted on the morning after victory that the promises had been false all along.

This was the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless remain campaign attempted to fight fantasy with facts, but quickly found that the currency of fact had been badly debased.The remain side’s worrying facts and worried experts were dismissed as “Project Fear” – and quickly neutralised by opposing “facts”: if 99 experts said the economy would crash and one disagreed, the BBC told us that each side had a different view of the situation. (This is a disastrous mistake that ends up obscuring truth, and echoes how some report climate change.)

Michael Gove declared that “people in this country have had enough of experts” on Sky News. He also compared 10 Nobel prize-winning economists who signed an anti-Brexit letter to Nazi scientists loyal to Hitler. It can become very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and 'facts' that are not…

For months, the Eurosceptic press trumpeted every dubious claim and rubbished every expert warning, filling the front pages with too many confected anti-migrant headlines to count – many of them later quietly corrected in very small print. On the same day Nigel Farage unveiled his inflammatory “Breaking Point” poster, and Labour MP Jo Cox, who had campaigned tirelessly for refugees, was shot dead, the cover of the Daily Mail featured a picture of migrants in the back of a lorry entering the UK, with the headline “We are from Europe – let us in!” The next day, the Mail and the Sun, which also carried the story, were forced to admit that the stowaways were actually from Iraq and Kuwait.

 A few days after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side knew all along that facts would not win the day. “It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

 Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.

What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.

Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). ……

There are usually several conflicting truths on any given subject, but in the era of the printing press, words on a page nailed things down, whether they turned out to be true or not. The information felt like the truth, at least until the next day brought another update or a correction, and we all shared a common set of facts. 

This settled “truth” was usually handed down from above: an established truth, often fixed in place by an establishment. This arrangement was not without flaws: too much of the press often exhibited a bias towards the status quo and a deference to authority, and it was prohibitively difficult for ordinary people to challenge the power of the press.

Now, people distrust much of what is presented as fact – particularly if the facts in question are uncomfortable, or out of sync with their own views – and while some of that distrust is misplaced, some of it is not.

update; I now see that there was talk in Britain even in June of "post-truth politics" - and that I must have borrowed my title for this post from a post on 23 June by Chris Grey

Why the natives are revolting

Only those wishing to see Britain destroyed could have wished for the events now playing out in the country in which I spent my first fifty years -

“Take back control” was the slogan of those wanting out of Europe – instead of which everything seems to be spiralling out of control. Owen Jones is the author of a book The Establishment – and how they get away with it which excoriated the British power structure and has given us perhaps the pithiest view of the past week’s events - 

- The Brexiteers have no plan; they began backtracking on their promises within hours, which may well produce a firestorm of fury in the coming months;

- the Prime Minister is resigning (and the Leader of the Opposition has massively lost a vote of confidence from his parliamentary colleagues) 
- the economy faces turmoil, as do jobs and people’s living standards
- The country is more bitterly divided (and in so many different ways) than it has been for generations; Scotland is on course to leave and precipitate the break-up of the country, and who can blame them; xenophobia and racism have been given renewed legitimacy; the Northern Ireland peace process is under threat.
- The hard right of the Tory Party is on the cusp of power; 
- and the EU — fearful of its future survival — is preparing to offer punitive terms to Britain.

 We may well be at the beginning of the biggest calamity to befall this country since the end of the war.

This A-Z of Brexit was apparently written the day after the vote to leave and is a rather longer and emotional commentary….

The Current Moment is an interesting collective blog which draws attention today to the blow which the referendum seems to have struck to progressives’ beliefs in democracy -  

every self-described leftist – even those who openly recognised the EU’s undemocratic nature and brutal record in southern Europe – supported Remain.

Fundamentally, leftists doubted their capacity to lead the British public towards a progressive Brexit. Instead, they warned, Boris Johnson would sweep to power and dismantle what was left of social democracy – apparently with popular consent.
They backed continued EU membership to maintain policies and institutions that they feared the population would not support in a fully democratic system. Lacking any real belief in the EU, the left was unable to offer a positive vision of EU membership and fell back on elite-led scare tactics.

The issues of democracy and self-determination were given up to the political right, as was leadership on both sides of the debate, allowing conservatives to define the debate over the future. Ducking the issue of principle in the name of strategic nous, the vote was lost anyway, creating the outcome the left had feared all along: Brexit, led by the right. 

After the vote, this defeatist orientation of the left has resulted in a social media spasm of vitriol directed against the old, the poor and the uneducated. 

This piece on “Why elections are bad for democracy” seems to catch the mood well - although the book from which it is excerpted is part of a much older argument about representative democracy.......

But it is perhaps Glenn Greenwald’s “Intercept” column which gives the most sustained analysis of the reasons for the profound rejection of the political class we have been seeing in recent years… His argument basically is that......

a sizable portion of the establishment liberal commentariat in the West has completely lost the ability to engage with any sort of dissent from its orthodoxies or even understand those who disagree. They are capable of nothing beyond adopting the smuggest, most self-satisfied posture, then spouting clichés to dismiss their critics as ignorant, benighted bigots.

Like the people of the West who bomb Muslim countries and then express confusion that anyone wants to attack them back, the most simple-minded of these establishment media liberals are constantly enraged that the people they endlessly malign as ignorant haters refuse to vest them with the respect and credibility to which they are naturally entitled. 

 The referendum, of course, only seemed to be about Europe - in reality it was probably more about identity and fear of "the other"...what Europeans actually make of the referendum and its result is of little interest to the English electorate.....but, for what it's worth, the inestimable Eurozine site offers some feedback

The newspapers and journalists who are the subject of Glenn Greenwald’s vitriol do, of course, contain exceptions – John Harris and Gary Younge being the two who try to keep the reputation of The Guardian intact.  Younge’s “long read” today packs eloquence and insight ……

Lying has consequences that last far longer than individual acts of deception: it ruins the liar’s ability to convince people when it really matters. The source of the mistrust between the establishment and the country isn’t difficult to fathom.

Next week the Chilcot inquiry will publish its findings into the Iraq war. After Iraq, we faced an economic crisis that few experts saw coming until it was too late. Then followed austerity; now the experts said this was precisely the wrong response to the crisis, but it happened anyway. 

When leaders choose the facts that suit them, ignore the facts that don’t and, in the absence of suitable facts, simply make things up, people don’t stop believing in facts – they stop believing in leaders. They do so not because they are over-emotional, under-educated, bigoted or hard-headed, but because trust has been eroded to such a point that the message has been so tainted by the messenger as to render it worthless…………..

 It may seem a minor matter in the wake of this referendum to say that our political parties are failing in their historic mission, but we would not have arrived here were they not doing so.
 The party set up by trade unions to represent the interests of workers in parliament no longer commands the allegiance of those people. True, almost two-thirds of Labour voters did vote remain – but an overwhelming number of the working-class, the poor, and the left-behind put their faith in leave.

Meanwhile, the party of capital and nation has presided over a painful blow to the City and the Union.

 Neither party is fit for purpose………….

I generally have no time for Twitter - but feel that this blow-by-blow analysis by one of the Economist analysts says it all 

Europe's Fateful Day

My last post predicted (on 14 June) that those voting to leave would significantly outnumber the others but, as one Prime Minister of the 1970s famously said, "a week is a long time in politics"

I was, like most people, shocked by the killing of a young English Labour MP last week, this being the main reason why the promised summary of Barnett's book has not yet appeared. The murder may or may not be the factor which has apparently seen a significant swing toward "remain" (and the betting money is certainly on that result).

What people actually do when they reach the privacy of the polling booth (if they actually do) is always the imponderable as I well know from personal experience. In 1979, I was a very active public campaigner for a "no" vote in the referendum about creating a Scottish Parliament (I felt then it was the slippery path to independence); I appeared on public platforms with prominent MPs – but- when it came to vote - I actually found myself putting a cross in the "yes" box!!    

So now, as British voters trek to the polls, the feeling is that "remain" might just make it.......

Here are two thoughtful pieces on the implications of the campaign from one of my favourite journals – this one which focuses on the fact that Britain has always had a “semi-detached” view of Europe  and a short magisterial piece which refers to a writer (JB Priestley) from the area in which the young MP was born -   

who is remembered mostly for a single play, which he wrote towards the end of the second world war but which he set two years before the start of the first. It covers a single evening in the life of a smug, prosperous Midlands family, the Birleys, who are enjoying a celebratory dinner. It is interrupted by an unexpected caller, an inspector of police. A young woman is dead.

 It emerges in the course of his interrogation that every member of the Birley family contributed in some way to Eva Smith’s suicide. It’s all a bit schematic; at times it creaks. Yet this standby of tatty rep – with its old-fashioned Christian Socialist values, its whiff of the supernatural, its overhanging presentiment of mass slaughter, its mysterious denouement – somehow moves and provokes modern audiences. It has become one of the classics of our age. Young people love it. 

Now, why might that be? It’s a question worth asking at the end of this vicious campaign, as we look with foreboding to a denouement of our own making in the early hours of Friday. I suspect what appeals to young people about this play, what gives it meaning in their own lives, is that it preaches – and it does preach – the importance of moral responsibility.
Read the inspector’s closing speech. I’ve retained the name of the original character, Eva Smith, but it might be interesting if you substituted the name of a young woman from an ethnic minority. 

But just remember this. One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths left with us, with their lives, their hopes and their fears, their suffering and a choice of happiness, all intertwined with our lives and what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.

 In the end, the early summer of 2016 was never about money, about a balance of economic advantage, about notions of sovereignty, about the parrot cries of 'freedom for Britain’ or 'Britain first’.

It was not even about immigration. It was about a shocking want of kindness, an absence of love, a grievous loss of humanity. The inspector is calling. Again he’s calling. This time, he’s calling on us.

Der Spiegel has a longer article here. And the Dublin Review of Books does a good summary of the debate as it took place in the columns of the Guardian newspaper

If the vote is for "leave", this piece will be worth studying in detail   

Making sense of the Referendum (and UK politics)

The mood in England (less so in the other 3 parts of the UK – particularly Scotland) seems this past week to be consolidating around withdrawal from the European Union. We have known that a significant section of the British population has never found involvement in Europe to their liking but -  

that Brexit is holding at around 45% support according to the polls; that it has two ruling party politicians (the cabinet’s most able thinker and one time confidant of the prime minister, and the Tory's most popular star) as its leaders; that they are supported by around half of the party's MPs and a clear majority of Conservative voters; that they might even win!............ This should not be remotely credible.

My blogposts this past week have been trying to shed some light on how on earth the country has got to this point.

But I discovered this morning that someone has, in the past few months, been writing and publishing the definitive explanation …..and that is Anthony Barnett of the Open Democracy website whose Blimey – it could be BREXIT ! has been serialising on a weekly basis on that site for the past 3 months.

It is, quite simply, one of the most stunning things I have read for many years – written by someone who has had a unique position at the heart of key debates about political power since the early 1970s and whose independence from any employer or ideology allows him to write with a unique balance of coherence and intellectual depth. 

As Barnett explains in his introduction - 

“Blimey!” is not 'about' the referendum or reporting its ups and downs week by week. My aim is to explain its 'meta-politics': what to make of why it is occurring, where it comes from, what forces are contained within this strange event, what the consequences may be for all of us in the UK and in Europe over the longer term.

I have not yet finished my reading of the 12 sections (at least 200 pages) but what impresses me is the clarity of expression; the width of his reading; and the generosity of his quotations and attributions. 

Conscious that about 75% of my readers are not native English speakers, I will try to summarise the points which particularly impressed me and post this asap .....

In the meantime, just click and dip in.....see for yourself

INTRODUCTION PART I: The Conjuncture 1. Thatcherism’s twin legacy defines the choice 2. Must the left be skewered, process and content 3. Dodgy Dave's referendum deal 4. Would you believe it, Boris and Gove defy corporate fatalism 5. It's a bad referendum, as Obama discovers 6. Maddening times 7. The curse of Brexit: the referendum claims its first scalp, Scottish Labour 8. The European project is ours: roll up our sleeves for remain  9. Labour's moribund referendum

PART II: What is sovereignty about? 10. England's Brexit  11. Let's Take Control! Brexit and sovereignty

Why immigration is the only issue in this referendum

One issue has dominated the British referendum debate of the past few months - and that is immigration.

Those wanting Britain to remain in Europe have talked in vain about the economic aspects – people no longer trust economic arguments and forecasts or those who use them. Even references to “European bureaucracy” - which for so long has been the staple fare of the overwhelmingly negative British media coverage of European affairs – have been put aside in favour of a focus on immigration.

And it didn’t need last year’s pictures of the hordes of Syrian refugees crossing the Aegean or smashing Balkan border fences to make this the number one issue in the campaign. Four million English citizens had in Britain’s 2015 General Election given their vote to UKiP – the nationalist party – four times as many as had voted for the Scottish Nationalists (who had as a result gained 50 Westminster seats).  
Such, however, is the nature of the British electoral system (“first past the post”) that UKiP won only one seat!!! 

The electoral support should have been a wake-up call but one solitary figure on the parliamentary benches has given the political elite the excuse to ignore the increasing alienation of the (mainly) the English citizen from the democratic process….The media attention given during the decade to parliamentary expenses (and business corruption) was certainly one factor in this but the two main factors in this alienation have been -

- the continuing economic decline in so many parts of the country; and 
- the awareness since 2000 of a growing number of immigrants - even in these areas - with the low-paid being nudged out of jobs by those prepared to accept less; and pressure on public services already being starved of resources

Just three weeks ago, a short House of Commons Briefing Paper on Migration Statistics set out (in chart 5) the facts very starkly – net annual immigration to Britain was a tiny blip from 1930-1960; actually negative from 1960-80 and less than a few thousand in the 1980s….

Only from the mid 1990s did it start to rise – 50,000 in 1998. But in the next decade it shot up – to almost 250,000   

The 2004 enlargement of the European Union (EU) to eight Eastern European countries (EU8) generated fears of large flows of low-skill immigrants from Eastern to Western Europe. For this reason most Western European countries (EU15) imposed temporary restrictions to the free movement of people from Eastern Europe. But the UK (along with Ireland and Sweden) did not impose any such restrictions – as a result “the Polish plumber” became a bone of contention in the country….

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were the key players at the time – and it is therefore odd to see them popping up this week to argue the case for “Remain”. Blair knows he lost all credibility during the Iraq war - but Brown does not seem to realise that his role in the final week of the Scottish referendum of 2014 finished him as a figure of influence   

Very few British journalists operate outside the “Westminster bubble”. John Harris is a rarity..... Some five years ago he started to go round the country and use video for carrying out sharp interviews with the public…to get a sense of their concerns......all of which carried clear warnings for the political elite. This article from February this year was a great summary of what he was finding…Just a few weeks ago, he ran with this warning…Today saw his final post - from the Labour stronghold of Stoke-on-Trent - where those canvassing what they considered to be Labour voters could find only an angry determination to leave the EU

Rather belatedly, a few politicians have been trying to address the concerns. But it is too late – the scale of disgust and anger of the public is simply irresistible….

update - a further development here - with an important figure conceding that Europe needs to change tack on free movement of labour...but such a change is totally impossible.....

Two weeks ago pundits were saying that "it would be OK on the night" - that voters would, in the privacy of the polling booth, vote remain. It is now obvious that the opposite is happening....My prediction is of a LEAVE VOTE winning margin of 7-8%. I may not be in the country - or been so for a few years - but the few reporters I trust have been on the doorsteps and in the (Labour) party rooms and have a very good sense of the mood........
Frank Field has long been a maverick voice in the Labour party but he has been one of the few to articulate grass-roots concerns….

update April 2017; and here's a great chart!